The global internet has become a mass commercial marketplace. The internet offers a wide variety of media such news websites, downloadable music, and video. The internet also offers many online commercial services such as investment services, banking, telecommunication, and computer services. The internet even provides a convenient means of obtaining physical products through the use of online merchants and auction sites.
Over the past twenty years many very large commercial businesses have been founded, grown, and prospered on the internet. These internet-centric businesses use the internet as their main (and sometimes only) method of communication with customers. These internet-centric businesses are able provide various goods and services to consumers in a very efficient manner since a number of automated customer handling systems are used to perform much of the interaction with their customers. For example, internet-based retail stores generally display products, accept product orders, and accept payment for product orders in a fully automated manner without any human intervention. In this manner, the internet-based retail stores are able to keep the cost of each customer transaction very low such that large numbers of transactions are able to be handled at a low cost. Thus, it is not uncommon for a commercial internet-based business to provide services to millions of different customers each day.
In order to provide services to millions of different consumers each day, the server systems of a large commercial internet-based business must be designed with great care. And as any successful business owner knows, a key to business success is consistency and reliability of service. Thus, large commercial internet-based business must provide fail-safe mechanisms that will keep the server systems of the business operating despite the inevitable failure of any individual component of the server systems. And since the Internet is available world-wide, there will always be a customer looking for services no matter what time of day it is such that the server systems must provide services twenty-four hours each day.